Tips For Implementing Speech Analytics

Tips For Implementing Speech Analytics

ContactBabel recently published the ‘The Inner Circle Guide to Customer Contact Analytics’ which was sponsored by Business Systems. For those with a hectic schedule, we created a short series of blogs covering some of the main points highlighting the latest insights on speech analytics covered in the guide. Please find the fourth in the series below.

PRE-IMPLEMENTATION: SELECTING A SOLUTION

Speech analytics technology is pretty sophisticated and complex stuff, so prior to implementation there is quite a lot to do to get your organisation ‘speech analytics ready’. First some questions to ask yourself;

• What do you want your implementation to achieve?
• What are the capabilities of the solutions you are looking at?
• What ROI’s do you anticipate achieving?
• What IT resources do you have in place to support you?
• Have you anticipated how analytics may change the way you function/operate?
• Do you have a plan in place to deal with the insights and recommendations the technology uncovers?
• Have you considered the scalability of the product and how it can be used in future?

INITIATOR AND PROJECT CHAMPIONS

Once you have answered these questions in a meaningful way, you need to look at your people internally to identify who will be involved at various stages of the project and who will take overall ownership.

Project champions

In many larger organisations, new roles are evolving such as “Customer Experience Director” or “VP of Customer Care” and it is this type of job role that provides the responsibility, knowledge and credibility within the organisation to drive the use of analytics. It is also important to have someone at this level involved to help get buy-in for and implement the departmental changes identified by the analytical process.

Who to get involved

Depending on what you want to get out of analytics, different people will need to be involved. If the main objective is compliance based it will more likely involve your legal and compliance staff, if it’s focussed on agent performance and quality improvements it will involve the contact centre manager, QA and training teams. If however you’re primarily looking at business intelligence and voice of the customer, marketing, insight and transformation teams may need to be involved. In all cases however IT teams do need to be part of the equation and bought into what the organisation is doing, to ensure the appropriate support infrastructure is put in place from the outset.

Next steps

Once you have identified the key people to involve it all then comes down to planning with and selecting the right solution and vendor. Typical project milestones should include the following;

• Choosing a specific area of improvement and benchmarking it (baseline analysis). This may occur during a proof of concept – as it is manageable, quick to identify, not reliant on other elements, so a fair before and after measurement is possible.• Input from relevant departments into deliverables, explaining and agreeing what they have to put into the project themselves• Consider technical constraints and internal cultural preferences (e.g. propensity to host vs CPE) and build a vendor shortlist / request for proposal• Selection, including the vendors ability to build an ROI model / proof-of-concept trial for you, plus referenceable sites if required. Check interoperability and willingness to work between incumbent recording vendors and new customer contact analytics vendors.• Deployment either as trial or full roll-out.